Main menu

Take two on brewing a partigyle imperial stout

With the winter chill setting into the air, it was time to visit Mike up in Bow to brew another partigyle imperial stout. We were happy with both beers from the last time. Last year I might have over planned the brewing process. This year I took a bit of a less detailed approach in designing the parti-gyle, and I went crazy figuring out the base recipe. I did some analysis of the imperial stout recipes I could find. I started with the 13F (Imperial stout) category of the NHC recipe breakdown written up by GatorBeer, which he compiled from here. I then added all the recipes I could find, Katethe great, Jami’s recipe, BYO’s Stone RIS clone, and a few others. You can see the Imperial Stout Grain ratio spreadsheet here. We both liked the imperial stout from last time, but the reviews I got elsewhere indicated it wasn’t complex enough, and didn’t have enough stout character. With the spread sheet I could see the grain percentages to validate a recipe of our design. This past year a few ingredients have really stuck in my head. Chocolate wheat we used in the Janet’s Baby, golden naked oats I keep hearing about, and brown malt has been on my mind since reading Ron Pattinson’s Vintage Beers. The first two are somewhat new, and bring something unique to the recipe. The chocolate wheat brings a nice chocolaty note, while not being acrid or overly bitter like normal chocolate malt, and it adds some head retention from wheat. The Golden naked oats are a Crystal oat, bringing both the silky mouth feel of oats, but with crystal sweetness. Both of these are like two for one malts in my opinion. The brown malt seems like a throwback traditional malt to use, it’s what these beers used to be made mostly of. Inspire of these additions, we tried to simplify the grain bill from last years KTG kitchen sink recipe. This is a much more simplified recipe:

Our partigyle plan was similar to last year, mash all the grain except the roasted malts to allow us to create a distinct second runnings beer. For that we decided to make a dark english mild. We’d cap the mash with some additional base and crystal, to add some fresh sugars and body but hopefully pull most of the sugars from the third runnings. Here’s that recipe:

The plan for the brew day was simple, Mike would host and borrow a gigantic mash tun from his friend dave. We’d boil the stout in his keggle, and I’d bring my kettle, HLT, for the mild. We’d Aim for 10g of the 1.095 imperial stout, and 7g of the 1.038 ish mild. Things were a little hectic come brew day, we had a last minute cancelation and were a little short handed. I ended up helping Dave with his pale ale, while he watched his daughter, his partner had a sick kid. I had invited a friend up to see the brew day, as he’s interested in starting brewing. Needless to say it was controlled chaos. Logistically we were way smarter than last year. We moved stuff prior to making it too heavy, or after partially emptying it limiting our back breaking efforts. Our runoff volume was fine, but the mash tun had changed from the year before, it had a false bottom, but this time only a bazooka screen. I’m sure it was a combination of my over estimate of efficiency, mash ph, and the less efficient mash tun. What ever the cause, it didn’t change the end result, needing more sugar, we were low on gravity pre boil. We made the game time decision to go buy some dme. A costly ($13) decision, but the right one, otherwise this would have been an unimperial stout at 1.080. This brought the stout up to a reasonable 1.093 OG.

The mild came out as planned, a touch high on gravity 1.040, We certainly could have sparged more to lower that, but I was unsure how efficient we were going to be. I didn’t want to be boiling that for hours. Initially I had a beautifully simple idea on how to handle this beer. Take the runnings, and boil them wort until it reached a gravity of 1.035 and then add 30m hops, boil for 30m. The idea was to compensate for the uncertain gravity. It was unnecessary, but a good idea none the less. It’s a tool that should be in everyone’s tool box. All in all, despite being a very long day, we pulled off two beers, 9g of 1.090 imperial stout, and 5g of 1.040 mild. I’m looking forward to seeing how this one ages out, I’m still holding on last years bottles.